


The Makers of Men

by oubliance



Category: A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Academia, Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-24
Updated: 2013-11-24
Packaged: 2018-01-02 13:18:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1057234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oubliance/pseuds/oubliance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prequel to the Academia AU: an interlude, one afternoon, at school.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Makers of Men

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hedge_witch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hedge_witch/gifts).



> An extremely belated birthday story, for my dear Hedge_witch. 
> 
>  
> 
> [](http://www.tracemyip.org/)  
> 

'If help and salvation are to come they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.'

\--Maria Montessori, _The Absorbent Mind_ (1949)

 

The electric bells have stopped braying by the time he leaves the Hall. Only the big bell up at School House still rings insistently, always behind; lateness has taken on a sound of its own, the acid echo of a bell bleeding into pollen-heavy air. He hears desks shutting in the nearby division rooms, and a raised voice: ‘Quietly, quietly. Do me at least such a courtesy, before we declare open season on that poor scribbler, William Shakespeare, whose curse appears to fall only on those who assault his bones, and not – more’s the pity – on the crudest masticators of his grammar, else this form would be winnowed almost to nothingness.’ Unhappy laughter breaks out, then melts into the bell-noise.

The worst of examinations is anticipating them, and the best is the calm that follows, ten minutes or fifteen: perhaps an hour, if you’re fortunate. He likes the quiet. He always hangs back to let the others go first, and today there weren’t many of them to begin with. GCSE Russian: five boys islanded in the Hall; the stubborn and the studious and the strange; not rebels, but misfits; the sort of boys who might go either way. All of them left at once, not friendly enough to attempt a post mortem. If it were thirty years ago, Max thinks, closing the door quietly behind him, Russian would be the very last choice, wouldn’t it? He imagines an interview splayed out in newsprint: _‘It began when I chose my O-level options,’ traitor claims._

At night, when he’s sitting with Camille – or if he can’t sleep, because Camille’s not there, and the absence brings no more peace than the presence – he tries to decide how he would comport himself. In such a situation, under this pressure or that: what would he do? Arrest and trial are natural choices; and execution, of course, is almost the first thing that comes to mind. But by now he’s exhausted dramas like that, and looks for subtler predicaments: to be stripped of your honours, or to live on immoral earnings. What if nobody knows but you? What if Camille knows: or the whole world, but there isn’t enough proof for a trial? He will watch Camille’s face in the half-light, as drowsiness erases dread, and spin himself a new web; one misstep, he thinks, and the tripwire goes, and you’ve had it.

The reverberating bell is louder than Camille’s footstep. He comes from nothingness, or from the summer winds: like Ariel, brittle and dizzying; unexpectedly tender of heart; remembering what it means to be bound. You never know when to expect him, because he seems to come and go not even by his own choice, but swept by some breeze invisible, always running before it. Max touches his arm: is this the genuine Camille, come back?

Camille throws out his other hand theatrically and says, ‘Reach hither thy finger, and be not faithless.’ But he repents at once, and stepping forward, turns his cheek; he hides his wanness in Max’s lapel, as if ashamed, as if the rough grey wool were muslin.

Max says, ‘How long have we got you for?’

‘A week,’ Camille says. ‘Maybe longer.’ His manner implies a great hidden uncertainty, as if no one can say – not even the permission-givers, the doctors, the masters; neither the Head Man nor the trick-cyclist: the latter a lean, blond man whom Camille hates – how long his tenure is to last, or for what infinitesimal act of grace it might be rescinded; for what sin, lengthened. Max knows it’s no use, asking more questions now. Camille won’t talk out in the open; he won’t explain anything in a public corridor: or if he does, the explanation will edge little by little into something ghastly and unlikely; before you know it, you’re in the bramble-patch or the swamp, or cowering under a bridge as pitiless eyes rake the stonework. These explanations are not exactly lies, but even so: no one enjoys hearing them. Question Camille too closely, and you won’t sleep well that night.

And so Max nods and leads Camille with him, as though Camille is still a new child: in fact, he’s not certain that Camille has learnt the geography of the place as well as he should have done. Or else it’s a convenient fiction, Camille’s dreaminess, the way he turns up in the map-cupboard when he ought to be safely in the lab; you cannot reproach someone who’s lost: if you do, then you are heartless. Of course he would never take Camille’s hand in public, but when it’s a question of keeping him on the right path – avoiding, in particular, the magnetism of disregarded books, the urgent allure of corners overlooked by no one – he permits himself a neutral, steering touch. Except at the worst, Camille’s behaviour no longer provokes much comment; he, though, is never absent, never safe: he is protecting himself, and knows it.

In the pantry, he fills the kettle automatically, his eyes on Camille. He thinks of saying, you have grown very little in three years; but then, he is not tall either, and although Camille isn’t quick to take offence – at least, not with him – he has always possessed a keen sense of the ridiculous. Camille’s jersey looks impossibly ragged: as though somebody’s taken a pair of scissors to it. And that could have happened, Max thinks; I’d be surprised, he tells himself, but only mildly. He spoons coffee granules into a mug. Camille believes that Nescafé is poisoned, but this belief does not restrain him from drinking it. He does so under protest, of course: but what other choice is there, when nothing better is offered? Camille has been known to accuse his schoolmasters of harbouring the conviction that cafetières are teats on the Devil’s grey dugs. He has been known to repeat this accusation in chapel, as loudly as his small voice permits, during the creed, and with no shirt on: only a woman’s scarf wrapped around his body. It looked like woven blood; nobody present has forgotten that day.

Max says, ‘I’ll trim your hair. While you’re here – we might as well.’ Camille will let no one else near it: he has a terror of shearing. Should their coach happen to pass a field where, mid-clip, an unlucky flock bubbles with misery, Camille will curl into a ball on the seat with his eyes screwed shut, and they’ll arrive at their destination – the play, the concert, the museum – already exhausted, Camille tottering in their wake on slippery thin feet. The perils of exeats, Max has remarked to himself, when you are too unpopular to be invited to anyone’s home, and Camille is popular enough, but forbidden. What do they imagine he’ll do? Slip his moorings in some way or other: seduce his schoolfellows’ sisters, or their mothers, or their fathers; lose himself, and come round to find the blood of the family dog under his little nails? This misconception is gratifying to Camille, and he does nothing to debunk it; to be thought dangerous is usually more of an advantage than a hindrance.

And so they are parcelled up with the other oddments – unwanted boys, those whose smell is ranker than that of their fellows; those whose acne makes you think, arcanely, of the pox – and herded into a coach; swept away to improve their minds, they prefer to meditate on natural injustice: except Camille, who whispers involved, fantastic narratives into Max’s ear until nausea steals the last of his voice and further whitens his white cheek.

‘Do you know the exams have started?’ Max says, watching Camille’s mouth, which seems in no way to match the institutional coffee mug clasped by its possessor.

Camille answers with a small nod, no words. He speaks more easily at night, more easily in confined spaces; worst under scrutiny. He bites his lip, and absently strikes the window-sill with his wrist: a faint knock from the wood, and Max thinks, that must have hurt him, but Camille’s expression doesn’t change. He looks, if anything, calmer than usual.

I’ll ask if we can work in the library together, Max resolves. I can revise there as well as anywhere else. He’ll be happier; maybe he’ll stay till the end of term: in the evenings we can walk in the orchard. This is one of the privileges attendant on being a house prefect, a position to which Max was raised at the beginning of Michaelmas Term, months ago now. Examined coldly, it has brought him more trouble than pleasure: but the widened bounds, the greater liberty? These boons come into their own in exam term, when the evenings soften and lengthen, and the grass under the apple trees susurrates as it grows up uncut, unchecked, dampening the trousered legs of any who walk in it with washes of gathered dew. What better companion than Camille? There is no one else: when once you’ve known him, all other company becomes tolerable at best, riven with disappointment. If Camille seems, sometimes, like a small child – straying from his mother’s hand; looking for it, with his desolate black eyes – Max knows that this is four-fifths an illusion. Camille’s mind outgrew his body years ago, and now it is distantly and unfathomably adult; yet its thoughts, its tastes, remain commingled with the inexplicable sediment of grief which is plain to see in him every day: when he gets up and when he goes to bed, there it always is. You would think Camille was an orphan, if you didn’t know better.

Suddenly Camille says, ‘Father Bérardier is to teach me Hebrew. We begin tomorrow.’

He looks gravely pleased, and Max finds himself laughing: Russian over and done with, and Camille returned. All at once it’s a red letter day, and he says, ‘I’ll make some more coffee. We’ll drink to – to your embarkation upon a distinguished career in Hebraic Studies, I think.’ He turns on the tap and holds the kettle under it, flinching from the steam that belches up as water strikes the hot interior.

The School House bell rings for the half hour, this time unheralded by the braying of its electric kindred. Time has passed, but afternoon school continues: boys repeat conjugations, and pour mixtures into test-tubes with gloved, cautious hands. No less attentive is Max, filling Camille’s mug and giving it back to him. ‘Careful,’ he says. ‘It’s boiling.’ At last Camille smiles. When his smile is unlooked for, then it comes – like grace, Max thinks, though he would never say so. The sweetness of it baffles him and dries up his words, as if all his thoughts, and all possible syllables, are sprays of water or scatterings of dew: and Camille, smiling like that, is the sun high in the sky above Athens, above Rome.

Max wants to close his eyes. His heart is dazzled into utter silence.

  
*

 

'We must make of the future generation, _powerful men_ , and by that we mean men who are independent and free.'

\--Maria Montessori, _The Montessori Method_ (1912)


End file.
